I start to brainstorm ideas for the Pokemon illustrations of the coming week over the weekends. There have been plenty in the past that require more thought than I expect and Octillery was one of the worst! I contemplated a Dalek version and even a Cthulu oriented illustration but only yesterday did I figure out what to channel for our 8 legged friend...POKEMON x SPLATOON!

I’ve yet to play Splatoon but holy moly, does it look fun and awesome! Splatoon makes me happy because it’s a new Nintendo IP! It makes me sad because it makes me realize these IPs really drop so darn rarely from a company that’s capable of coming up with amazing new ideas. With Splatoon on the horizon and their theme of ink and squids/octopi, I was super excited to get started on a way to fuse it with Octillery.

Octillery evolves from a revolver to become a turret. I had a few ideas as to how I could push Splatoon into the piece. I could make Octillery an Octoling or an Octarian, or make him a weapon like his namesake/concept. I realized if I didn’t put an inkling into the picture, the Splatoon reference might be lost on many as the franchise is only in its infancy.

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I drew up an organic Octillery to get the basis of how I could design the turret. I imagined it could perch itself on rocks and shoot ink into the ocean to attack it’s prey. From there, I sought to mechanize where I realized fanning out the legs would be better to give it more stability. Design-wise, I looked into the enemy Octoling enemy designs but also made sure to make it bright. I suppose you could imagine that this weapon used by the Inklings is that they’ve stolen Octo technology and sorta made it their own.

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How I imagine this weapon to be is that it’s awarded for a team that’s struggling against the enemy. Air support is called in and drops Octillery. A player can man the turret and fire ink at rapid speed at incredible range to cover ground or take out enemies. After some time, Octillery needs to cool down and during this time, you can actually move the turret over to a new location; this is possible thanks to it’s legs. However, as it is in cooldown, it can only walk so fast and leaves you vulnerable as you cannot attack in this state. This balances it to prevent it from being too OP...Unlike that roller some people are talking about. It has a set amount of ink to fire off, so when it’s done, it’ll just pick itself up and walk away, exploding after a short time to hurl your team’s ink everywhere!

The “mask” of Octillery being grey is a reference to the Octoling goggles, while incorporating the original design of the eyes/lids of Octillery. I decided to throw in blue paint to break up the warm colors that are pushed by its body and of Inkling’s’ orange hair and hat. Speaking of which, I decided to have a little fun with the clothes as customization is a big part of Splatoon. The hat is the bandana that May wears and the shirt features a Blooper from Super Mario Bros. Not sure if the game has a shirt like that but it totally should!

The painting style is loosely based on the Splatoon art style which is messy and gorgeous, full of life and color. I worked on the piece in a more rigid manner to get my details right and was going to push it out more neat. I would have commit all the way to the style but I didn’t think anyone really could see that as again, this series is still new and the art hasn’t been seen by many. The style used for today is then a mix of my clean approach with some looser strokes with bursts of colors.

So there you have it! Although there’s more going on here, this actually took less time than yesterday’s piece. Since the revolver was the main focus, I felt that my design choices would be more on display so things had to look really fit and precise, including the application of paint to create the subject. This time around, things are more chill and loose. Hope you guys like the piece! I’m out!

Exploring the creatures of Gold and Silver, Pokemon One a Day Series 2 can be seen as both a standalone project and expansion to the original marathon of artwork that sought to present one unique new illustration per day. This project builds upon the exploration of personal technical and philosophical concepts and visual styles under daily deadline to create quality works for personal and professional growth.